Does Your Child have a Hero?

John Adams said, “our government is designed for a moral and virtuous people.”

A people possessing the virtues of: courage, temperance, wisdom, and justice. Paramount – charity, faith and sacrifice. So how can we do this? – How do we teach our scholars virtue? I believe that it can be learned through emulation – making the best characteristics of a noble and great person our own.

And this is done through the study of history and biographies. We learn about the noble and great and it forever plants in our hearts and minds:

1. Standards of resolution
2. Allegiance to principle, country and friend
3. A strengthening of conscience and a resistance to the fierce blandishments of will.

The scholar emulates these great people and in so doing learns to do her best – by and for those who have depended on her and that she may have done that best, and often, when she did not want to, when she was exhausted or when in doubt of the wisdom of the duty prescribed to her, or when a hundred other obligations competed for her attention.

She understands, before those she studied were great, they were studded by failure, by error, by self-doubt and that in acknowledging these to be true and by mastering their consequences, learning from them and moving on, that they earned their reputation, the fame of succeeding generations, that was their noblest reward.

They were not the best and the brightest. They were the wisest and bravest.

So I would ask – is there a person in history that you love, whose life somehow speaks directly to your own consciousness, whose life, with its sorrows and exaltations, somehow means something to the way you live your own? A life you can somehow realize?

Find people who inspire you! Study their lives and you will find and live up to greatness.